Ergen, Viola

ORAL HISTORY OF VIOLA ERGEN
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
July 18, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is June 18th, 2011, and I’m speaking with Mrs. Viola Ergen here at her home in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Ergen, let’s start at the very beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised, and something about your family.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh. Well, I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10th, 1915, so I’ve been around for a while, and I graduated from the University of Minnesota in class of four hundred men and one woman.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: I was an accounting major, and was probably one of the first women accountants in the state of Minnesota.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mrs. Ergen: So I had a job with the university after I graduated, and in 1944, I was married to Dr. William Ergen, who was a nuclear scientist.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you graduate college?
Mrs. Ergen: 1938. June ’38.
Mr. McDaniel: And you worked at the college there.
Mrs. Ergen: I worked at the University of Minnesota as a Senior Accountant for many years.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Where did you meet your husband?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I met him at the Minneapolis Hiking Club.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mrs. Ergen: I used to go hiking every Sunday with the Minneapolis Hiking Club around the state of Minnesota for my exercise and energy after weeks sitting at a desk, and I knew a lot of the people in the club to begin with, and so it was something sponsored by the Park Board of Minneapolis. And a lot of people, young and old, belonged to it for years, and they enjoyed their hikes on Sunday, and we had an evening one on Wednesdays in the city, but the ones on Sunday were out of the city. Anyway, we were married in 1944, and he was working for Minneapolis Honeywell at the time on the automatic pilot.
Mr. McDaniel: He was working for Minneapolis what?
Mrs. Ergen: Honeywell.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, Minneapolis Honeywell, okay.
Mrs. Ergen: Minneapolis Honeywell on the automatic pilot, and then they got a contract for guided missiles, but Minneapolis Honeywell decided not to do this contract because it was not really their kind of job. They’re into small instruments, like thermostats and things like that. So the contract was given to RCA, so we moved to Princeton, New Jersey for a year, and there I worked for the Gallup Poll as a statistician most of the time, but once in a while, I’d have to pitch in to take a couple of ballots out and test them out in one of the little towns around to see if they were correctly written, or were giving you some partisan advice. And after a year in Princeton, we were moved to Camden, New Jersey, where the project of guided missiles which my husband was working on was doing some more work. We were there for a year, and then he read in The New York Times about a position opening up in Oak Ridge, applied, and so we came to Oak Ridge to work.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. Ergen: That was 1947, June ’47.
Mr. McDaniel: So it was after the war. You came after the war was over.
Mrs. Ergen: After world war was over, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, your husband, now did he go to the University of Minneapolis?
Mrs. Ergen: No, he graduated from the University of Vienna. He was an Austrian.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Was he an engineer, a physicist?
Mrs. Ergen: No, a physicist. Yeah, a physicist, a nuclear physicist. He had been working on nuclear, oh, on the atom and that sort of thing, as a researcher for six years in Sweden after he graduated from college.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, and he ended up in the states for the job at Honeywell?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, he came during the war, and when they finished the automatic pilot, which I think they still use on airplanes, then they had to find another project.
Mr. McDaniel: So that’s what he was working on? He was working on the automatic pilot for the airplanes?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, and then when he came here, in Oak Ridge, he worked on the automatic airplane.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah. They were planning on a – I mean a nuclear airplane.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, the nuclear airplane.
Mrs. Ergen: The NEPA [Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft] program. And he worked on that for four years before they decided to disband the project.
Mr. McDaniel: They decided that nuclear reactor –
Mrs. Ergen: Not safe.
Mr. McDaniel: – that nuclear reactor on that airplane was 1) a little too heavy to get off the ground –
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: – and 2) if it went down, it might be a problem, right?
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. Those were the two things that were wrong with it. So he took a job at Y-12 then, and worked on nuclear reactors and the nuclear submarine, and he was one of the teachers at the Reactor School, so we had a lot of foreign visitors here at the time. We enjoyed having them here because my husband spoke a number of languages, and his mother came to live here in Oak Ridge, too, when it was opened up to other people, and she was a real linguist and spoke a lot of foreign languages, and so they enjoyed talking with her because she could switch off from French to German or Italian just like that, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did they talk to each other and you wondered what they said sometimes?
Mrs. Ergen: No, they always spoke English.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, they spoke excellent English. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good. I’d be a little paranoid if somebody started to speak in another language in front of me. I would wonder if they were going to talk about me. So your husband, he worked here in Oak Ridge –
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: – until he retired, I guess.
Mrs. Ergen: Until he died.
Mr. McDaniel: Until he died?
Mrs. Ergen: He died in February of 1971 of a heart attack.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, let’s talk about you a little bit. So you moved to Oak Ridge in ’47.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And at that point did you all have children, or did you go to work?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, no. We had our first child here, and she was born in November of ‘47, and that’s my oldest daughter. I had five children and they all went to Oak Ridge High School, through high school here, and all went to the University of Tennessee, and they’re all big Vol [Tennessee Volunteers] fans. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Are they? [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: So when the football season starts, I see lots of them.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Now, do any of them live close to here in Tennessee?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I have one that lives in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was thinking.
Mrs. Ergen: He’s in the emergency room at, well, Mercy Hospital now. But he’s been there now for twenty years or more.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s right. But they all come in to see Vols in the fall, huhn?
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, yes. They all come in at the fall.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, they come in during the rest of the year, too, but they’re here every weekend during a football game.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came here in ’47. Now, did you work? Did you get a job?
Mrs. Ergen: No, I never worked because I was expecting the first child in November, and so I did not work, but I can tell you that I was very disappointed when I got here. It was a very hot day, and we got this “D” house. At that time, a lot of the executive officers, military officers, had left these “D” houses. We really weren’t supposed to have a “D” house, but they had so many of them on hand that they decided to let the newcomers pick out a “D” house if they wanted it. And the rent was only something like fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents, or something like that, so we decided on the big house. We’d been living in one room for three years in different places, and a big house looked really good.
Mr. McDaniel: And a “D” house is a pretty good size house.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, it really did, but the only thing was that we opened the door and the place was jammed with cockroaches –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it really?
Mrs. Ergen: – and I just about died with those cockroaches running up and down the walls, and all over the floors and that, but my mother was with me, and she’s rather a calm person, and she said, “Let’s just call the management people.” And so they came out and put bombs in the house and sent us to the guesthouse for the night, and when we came back the next day, we shoveled up – [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Shoveled up the dead cockroaches, didn’t you? Now, where was the “D” house?
Mrs. Ergen: The “D” house was on Forest Lane, East Forest Lane.
Mr. McDaniel: East Forest Lane.
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm. And so we lived there from ’47 to ’54, seven years, and then we had the leasing of land in Oak Ridge for people to build houses, and so we applied for a lot over in East Village. But Dr. Sharpie bid more money than we did on that lot –
Mr. McDaniel: Uh-oh.
Mrs. Ergen: – so he got it and we didn’t. So we were without a lot, and shortly after that they had these lots in this area available, plus some other individual lots. But my husband liked this lot because it had the 40-foot slope, for some reason or another, and so he bid the minimum bid on this lot and nobody else wanted it, so we got it. So this is where I’ve been ever since.
Mr. McDaniel: Maybe it reminded him of home in the mountains, or something, you know?
Mrs. Ergen: I think it probably did. We could see the mountains then. We didn’t have these trees out here. We could look out over there and see the Smokies from here.
Mr. McDaniel: And so you bought this lot, and then you had this house built?
Mrs. Ergen: And we built the house.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. And so this was –
Mrs. Ergen: In ’54.
Mr. McDaniel: And at that point, how many children did you have?
Mrs. Ergen: I had five by then.
Mr. McDaniel: You had five by then? Okay.
Mrs. Ergen: So we needed all the space in here.
Mr. McDaniel: You sure did, didn’t you? Well, good. Well, what were some of the – I know you were busy being a mother and raising those kids, but I’m sure you were involved in the community some, as well.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes, everything.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that. Tell me what you got involved in –
Mrs. Ergen: Well, the first thing –
Mr. McDaniel: – in the early days.
Mrs. Ergen: – the very first thing I did was I was asked to join the League of Women Voters, and so I became a member and I enjoyed that for twenty-five years, and then I had my daughter who wanted to be a Girl Scout and there weren’t any people – well, there were some people, but nobody really wanted to be a leader, so I decided that I guess I could be a Girl Scout leader, and so that’s what I did for eighteen years. I have two girls, eleven years apart, so I went through the Girl Scout program with my oldest daughter, and then I went back to the Brownies with my second daughter, and went back through –
Mr. McDaniel: Had to start over again, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: – start all over again.
Mr. McDaniel: But I bet your younger daughter got a better Girl Scout program because of that, didn’t she? You’d already practiced on the oldest one –
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: – hadn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: You know what to do afterwards, and I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from those girls. I mean, I’d never been a Girl Scout myself, so I learned a lot, and I liked camping, and we liked hiking, and we did a lot of fun things. They really liked to camp, those girls did, and I had a troop of forty girls, so those were the days when we had big troops and we had a patrol system, so it wasn’t too bad taking care of that many girls. It’s just getting all the cars ready to drive camping someplace.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you go camping, usually?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, we went all around the state here. Up at north, they had a camping area, and Anderson County Park, and the Smokies, of course. Every year, we went to the Smokies at least once, and Standing Stone Park, and some of these others, way a little bit farther off up around Monterey.
Mr. McDaniel: My mother, she did that, too, because I have two sisters, and she was a Girl Scout leader, and I can remember –
Mrs. Ergen: And I worked with the Arboretum Society. My friend, Lois Good, said I need to join that group. I had nothing to do, and then, of course, when my husband died, I got the job at the Children’s Museum with Selma and I started –
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me about that. Tell me what you did there.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I had worked to help Joyce Maienschein beginning in ’73 to set up the museum because my girls had had the teacher’s museum that they had before that in Cedar Hill School, and then when they all graduated in ’65, we put everything we had, which is about three rooms full of artifacts, into storage. And so we took that out of storage when her girls took the museum over and reactivated it, and set it up in the old library in Jefferson Junior High School. In fact, the school had already been torn down, but the library was still there, and they tore it down at the end of that year.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Do you need to stop and get a drink or something?
Mrs. Ergen: No.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re sure you’re okay?
Mrs. Ergen: I need a cough drop. I’ve got something to drink here I guess I could –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, here –
Mrs. Ergen: – I’ll take a drink of water.
Mr. McDaniel: – if you need a cough drop, can I get it for you or do you want to go get it?
Mrs. Ergen: No, I can get it.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Ergen: – busy at the church. We joined the Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in ’48 when we came here. We kept our membership in Minneapolis, and then in ’48 we transferred it over here.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So we were talking about the Children’s Museum. Go ahead and tell me about that, because I remember, oh, what’s her name?
Mrs. Ergen: Selma Shapiro?
Mr. McDaniel: Selma. When I talked with Selma, she was talking about how the Girl Scouts had really started that.
Mrs. Ergen: Started it back, and they were going to tear down the library, so the City offered us space at the Highland View School, and that was a lower level. There were about five rooms that they had available, and so they offered us those rooms. In the meantime, they also had part of the school was rented to John Rice Irwin with the schools because he was teaching the driver’s education courses at the time –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: – and then they had these big machines over in Joyner, the Caterpillars for road building and construction there. He was teaching those people over there, too, in his office up there, so he had a big office up there along the hall, and we borrowed his Xerox machine all the time. And then we had a daycare up there, and they had a class for adults who were mentally handicapped there that spent the whole day up there, so they had other places rented out, and they had people in the gym, the fencers and karate people, and some of the people from the Lab played basketball in the evenings. But we had that downstairs area, and it was Selma and I, and we had a budget of three thousand dollars the first year, and we had no fees. We didn’t charge anybody to come in the museum. If they wanted to come in, they could come, and we were busy cleaning, it seemed to me, and dusting and setting things up for about a year, painting things, because there was just the two of us to do all the work, and so that’s what we did. Selma really had a vision for that museum. I mean, she said to me really early, she said, “You know, Viola?” she said, “One day,” she says, “We’re going to have this whole fifty-five thousand feet in this building with museum artifacts,” and I says, “Well, okay,” and I looked around at what we had so far. We didn’t have much.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: But we did have two cabins in there, and we had a lot of odds and ends. But we were very lucky. During the years, people gave us collections of great things. One of the first ones we got was a bunch of plows, including a very early plow, and then we had people with jugs, gave us a whole two hundred and fifty jugs of different kinds, and so it just gradually grew as we got to be known as taking anything anybody would give us. And so, actually, I’d say that we didn’t buy anything for that museum until we went to an auction up in London one time, and we had sixty dollars to spend. And we knew this woman, she had talked with us when we had our big, national grant, and she had a small museum and she was selling all her wonderful things. But everything she sold was bid more than sixty dollars, so we couldn’t afford to buy them. At the very end, either people felt sorry for us, or I don’t know what, but nobody else bid on this buttermilk painted chair, and so we said, “Well, we’ll take it for sixty dollars,” and then we did. So that thing is still there in the museum. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So a lot of the stuff you got was Appalachian-oriented, you know, a lot of those kind of things.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, a lot of those things were that and people’s collections, and they were so glad to have somebody who would take their things and take care of them and display them. And so most of the things we have there, the dolls, all the children’s toys and all the other things in that museum have been given to us. We really have not bought anything.
Mr. McDaniel: And I imagine you probably started getting, in addition to the Appalachian stuff, you probably started getting international things because of the people that lived in the area.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Many of them came from outside the country, you know, things such as that.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, we had this one woman who went to Africa to teach, and when she came back, that’s where most of our African things came from. She brought back these masks and just all kinds of things, sculptures and things, anything she found to buy while she was there. She was there for two years, and she brought those back with her and gave them to us, and I remember we have one chair, it’s a fork and spoon chair, nicely carved, that somebody brought us. I think it was Dr. Gurney, and he bought it and his wife didn’t like it, so he gave it to the museum, and we were delighted to have it. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, there you go.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, so it added to our collection, and of course, during 1982 when we had the World’s Fair in Knoxville, we got a lot of things from the people there, from the Chinese and Japanese people. So they added to our collection of Chinese and Japanese people, and Peg Heddleson added a lot of Norwegian things she’d saved, and she’s given them to the museum, so we do have them permanently.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mrs. Ergen: So that’s where we’ve gotten a lot of the foreign things, and you’re right about people – people in Oak Ridge and just the surrounding, like Oliver Springs in this area, have been very generous with what they’ve given the museum.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you worked, I mean you worked with her for –
Mrs. Ergen: Until 2002.
Mr. McDaniel: – until 2002. Right. Right, a long time.
Mrs. Ergen: So it was almost twenty-eight years or so, but I had known Selma before because we had both been active in the Girl Scouts, too. So I’d known her from that time, and our two oldest daughters are such good friends –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.
Mrs. Ergen: – so they still are and see each other periodically.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. You were going to talk a little bit about being appointed to the Historical Society.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, yes. This was back in 1971, and Mr. Bissell sort of appointed a board of directors and we started this museum, and our purpose was oral history. We had quite a few people who became members, and I have a scrapbook someplace and I haven’t found it – I was going to find it for you, but I didn’t find it so I’d have a list of the people that were members, but most of them have died. You know, like Mr. and Mrs. Kearsley were an older couple, and they were very anxious to do the oral history, and they did interview a lot of people, and I think all of the interviews are over at the library in that Oak Ridge section now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, in the Oak Ridge Room. I know they got a lot when they first started this project.
Mrs. Ergen: But after, I think about maybe eight years, it just got to be sort of lack of interest, I guess, and the Society was disbanded at that time. John Rule was president for most of the time. I remember that, and he’s been dead for some time, too, now. But it was an interesting experience.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So did you do any oral histories yourself? Did you do interviews with folks?
Mrs. Ergen: I interviewed a few people.
Mr. McDaniel: And what did you do? Did you tape record them, is that what you did, or did you just –
Mrs. Ergen: We just wrote it down.
Mr. McDaniel: You just wrote it down, okay. I see.
Mrs. Ergen: We didn’t really have tape recorders in those days. We just wrote it down. I remember one of the people I interviewed was a lady over in Oliver Springs, and she had gone to the Wheat School and she’d ridden by horse, and I was so intrigued with her getting on her horse every day and riding to school over there, and coming back on her horse. That sounded like a lot of fun.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. So what were some of the other activities you were involved in in town, other things? You did the Girl Scouts. You did the museum. You were involved in the historical group early on.
Mrs. Ergen: I was involved in the church, too. I taught Sunday school, and I taught children’s church for many years, and Ruth Winston and I had the Senior Lunch Bunch once a month for lunch, and that was a big job to call all these people. We called them all up every month to be sure they were coming, for these senior citizens.
Mr. McDaniel: My mother does that now for her church in Kingston. They have the, what do they call it, Young at Heart Group. They get together for a program or lunch once a month.
Mrs. Ergen: You look forward to it. But I like to travel. In fact, I never did much traveling until I was married. My husband liked to travel, so we always tried to travel someplace and do something interesting. But Katherine Ledgerwood, who was a social studies teacher at the high school –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, what was her name?
Mrs. Ergen: – Katherine Ledgerwood –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, Katherine Ledgerwood.
Mrs. Ergen: – and she had this commitment to travel, and every year, she’d plan with a group a trip someplace abroad, and very inexpensively. So her first trip was to Greece, and we lived on a ship for about two weeks, and went through the Greek Islands, went to Istanbul, and traveled in Turkey, but we stayed on the ship the whole time. And then we went to Cyprus, and the day we left, they were at war with the Turks.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Ergen: Then we went to Jerusalem, and they were surrounding us with guns most of the time.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mrs. Ergen: But we spent a week – no, not a week, but about four days in Jerusalem and then we went to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, which is no more, and came home from there, and it cost a thousand dollars –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? What year was that?
Mrs. Ergen: – for everything. 1974.
Mr. McDaniel: And so it was a thousand dollars apiece, or for you and your husband?
Mrs. Ergen: No, just apiece.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah, a thousand dollars, that’s still –
Mrs. Ergen: That was everything.
Mr. McDaniel: – that’s everything.
Mrs. Ergen: All your living expenses and your travel from here to there and back. You can’t do that today.
Mr. McDaniel: Can’t do that today. You can barely drive to Nashville for that. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: But she had trips like this every year, and then once, we went to Australia and New Zealand and China, of course, the free ungated countries and British, and all the other European countries. I was actually with her for fifteen years before she died. But I enjoyed those trips.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mrs. Ergen: And I went to a lot of ORICL [Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning] meetings when they started here. That was one of the best things I thought that we have in Oak Ridge for seniors is the ORICL program, because you can take whatever you want, and they’re all interesting and you know all the people, or you know half of the people, anyway.
Mr. McDaniel: When did they start the ORICL? About when did they do that? Do you remember?
Mrs. Ergen: I know it must be at least ten years ago. I’d say around 2000.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I was thinking late ’90s, something like that. But that’s good, and I guess most of them have been at Roane State, haven’t they?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes. But they have nice trips, too, and I think that it’s nice for us to visit the state and find some of these interesting places we have here in the state, too. And one of the things that I think is interesting is where they found all the ancient fossils up here where East Tennessee is, East Tennessee University, and that was only a few years ago that they discovered those.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that wasn’t too long ago.
Mrs. Ergen: It would be interesting to find something like that in your state.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. So you said your husband, he had a heart attack and died in ’71?
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you say ’71? So I guess, in ’71, I guess by then your kids were grown, most of them were grown.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, they were all grown. Mary was still twelve, my youngest daughter, and she was at home with me and Charlie was still here. He was still going to school, in high school, but the other three – my oldest daughter had already been married, and was living up at – no, she was in Kentucky at Louisville. They were living in Louisville in Kentucky at the time. And she had graduated from high school in ’65, so she had been out for some time.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Now, how was the school? I mean, you know, you’re from Minnesota, and your husband wasn’t from these parts, as we say, so what was it like for the two of you to come to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it was interesting. I mean everybody here was from someplace else, so you had to make friends, and everybody got together and we had a Cosmopolitan Club for the people here who came from other countries, and they had gatherings every month, so they had either talks or picnics, or they had something they did together, enjoyed each other, and I think we had about two hundred and forty different groups in Oak Ridge that you could join if you wanted to, so there was something for everybody. Whatever you liked and thought about doing, or enjoyed doing, if you wanted to knit or quilt or whatever it is, there was a place for you here in this town. And everybody was very friendly. I think they all were people coming from someplace where they didn’t know anybody here, so they were glad to make friends, and that’s what we did.
Mr. McDaniel: But I guess you were really from the city, I mean you grew up in the city, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, I grew up in a big city.
Mr. McDaniel: A big city, so even though it was cosmopolitan, it was still a little different for you.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes, it was a bunch of different – my friends came, they couldn’t enjoy the big lots. All this, we built, that we have right below us here that goes down to the creek, and the kids would have more fun, I mean, playing around in the neighborhoods. I mean you didn’t really worry about them at all. They’d go out for the day and go in the woods and swing on vines, and pretend they were, I don’t know what, fishermen or something down at the creek, and see if they could catch tadpoles or something. So they all had a good time here playing outside.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Now, I guess you felt like your kids got a pretty good education here in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I think that at the time, we did have an excellent school system here, and I think the courses were difficult enough for the children at the time. They had to really work at them. I know that Fred, that’s my middle son, took history from Mr. Puckett over here at the high school. He was a very difficult teacher, and he loved chemistry, and he really got such a good background that when he went to college, he zipped through all the chemistry because he’d had such a good background in chemistry here in school, so we have to thank Mr. Puckett for that. And I can’t think of anything that they could probably do better. The only thing was that when Mary came along, they were going to change the math to a decimal system, which they did, and then my friend, Miss Young up here, who was teaching sixth grade, got these children and they couldn’t pass first grade arithmetic, but boy, they sure did know decimal math, and they could score eighth grade or something on that. So she sat down with them for about six weeks to teach them arithmetic. Flashcards, and Mary came home and was flashing cards, eight times eight, and so on, you know so they could get that – but they hadn’t been taught because they were going to teach this new method of mathematics that didn’t exactly work out the way it should have, I guess, and so they went back to the old system of mathematics again.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember the new math.
Mrs. Ergen: Do you remember the new math?
Mr. McDaniel: I remember my mom and dad going, “What in the world is this about?” you know? They were like –
Mrs. Ergen: It was a little difficult.
Mr. McDaniel: “Sorry, son, you’re on your own,” when it came to this.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s about the way I felt, too, about that. So I think they did get a very good education here.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now, were they involved in sports?
Mrs. Ergen: Charlie is the only one who was involved with sports. Basketball. And he played basketball and just loved it, and did very well in that. He was very fast. He wasn’t quite six feet. He was just barely six feet, but he was fast, and even though he was smaller than some of the other players, he managed to play very hard and do very well.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did he go on to play basketball in college?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, he did. He played basketball the first year at UT as a walk-on and he played pretty much most of the time, but when he went to get on the varsity team his sophomore year, he was told that he probably wouldn’t play very much because everybody else on the team was a scholarship winner except himself. And so they had to play the scholarship winners, and so he probably wouldn’t play so much, so he decided to work on his studies instead.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, it served him well, didn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, he graduated a little early.
Mr. McDaniel: He could say, “I’ll show them.” Well, good.
Mrs. Ergen: So that’s what he did. He just went ahead and worked on his classes, then he was able to graduate a little early, from college, that is.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, anything else you want to talk about, anything you want to tell me about? I mean, you know, looking back on your time in Oak Ridge, what would you say would be the best thing about it, and what do you think would have been the thing that you wished had been different?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I hadn’t thought about it, but I think I enjoy small town living, frankly. I mean I enjoyed living in Minneapolis, it’s a beautiful city and it’s got so many lakes in it and there’s lots to do there, but living in Oak Ridge has been nice. You make friends and they’ve been friends basically for the life you’ve lived here, or the life they’ve lived here, and everything is so easy. I mean I don’t have to go very far to go downtown to shop, and everything is just kind of handy and close at hand. For me right now, it’s great living in Oak Ridge, except for the weather. I’d rather have Minnesota weather, where it’s a little cooler.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly, but I guess that it is one of the things, is people that come to Oak Ridge tend to stay in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Ergen: I think they do.
Mr. McDaniel: So you get to know them, and you stay friends for a long time.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. It’s a friendly city, and although there’s nothing wrong with a big city, but it’s lots of houses and lots of traffic and lots of roads, and lots of time to get from one place to the other. You spend an hour driving from one end of town to the other to find somebody or to visit with someone.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That was just like we were getting ready to leave, I looked and said, “It’s twenty till 2:00.” I said, “Jasmine, we need to pack up. We’ve got to get to Miss Ergen’s house,” so I was here in ten minutes. So you know, it’s handy that way. What would be the thing that you wished had been different about Oak Ridge, if there’s anything you can think of?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, in the early days, the secrecy was a little difficult to get in and out of Oak Ridge, and you didn’t get your friends in here very easily, and you had to always plan ahead of time, but that was all changed after they opened the gates. I don’t know that I’d change much about Oak Ridge, except I wish we had a decent mall and shopping here.
Mr. McDaniel: Join the club. [laughter] That’s what we need to have the new club is, Let’s Get a Decent Mall Club.
Mrs. Ergen: A decent mall, that’s right. That’s one thing I think they need in this town.
Mr. McDaniel: And, you know, at one point it was okay, I mean it was pretty good at one point.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, it was.
Mr. McDaniel: Early on, I think, and even before the enclosed mall came, the Downtown Shopping Center was pretty good.
Mrs. Ergen: I liked the original shopping center. It had a lot of charm.
Mr. McDaniel: It did. I remember going there.
Mrs. Ergen: And the Federal Bakery.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to say. I was about to say I remember walking by and smelling the Federal Bakery.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. We don’t have a bakery anymore. It’s all brought in. Those are the things that I miss, are a bakery. Back home, we used to just love the bakery around the corner because they had the best rolls, the best bread, and it was always the good smell outside when you went by, you know, all that good baking.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly, and Oak Ridge has changed, I guess, a lot. I imagine you all took the kids and went to, what was it, the Sky View? Was it the Skyline, Sky View?
Mrs. Ergen: Sky View.
Mr. McDaniel: The drive-in?
Mrs. Ergen: A drive-in center. Yes. Yes, we’d go out here to the one they had just out where the entrance to Oak Ridge is. They had one out there, and they had one by where the hotel – which hotel?
Mr. McDaniel: About where Kroger is now, isn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it was about in there, yes. About that area. They had one, too. And we’d pack the kids all up in the car one night, if there was a movie that they wanted to see, and pop a big bowl of popcorn, and we’d go over there and sit in our car and watch the movies.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course, I grew up in Kingston, so I remember us going to the Midtown Drive-In out there between Kingston and Rockwood and Harriman, you know, the same thing with us.
Mrs. Ergen: Fred came the other night and took me out, he and his wife came and took me out to dinner, and he said that the kids had gone out in the boat for the day and they were going to the drive-in movie to see Harry Potter, and I says, “Drive-in movie? Are they still around?” He said, “Yes, there’s one over in Knoxville someplace.”
Mr. McDaniel: There’s one, and I don’t know about the one in Knoxville, there’s one in Maryville –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh.
Mr. McDaniel: – on the other side. If you go from Maryville to, like, the Smokies, right outside the other side of Maryville, and they’re showing first-run movies, like the Harry Potter things, you know?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, maybe that was where they went.
Mr. McDaniel: It could have been. I mean it’s a pretty nice, big drive-in movie theater.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I think they were great to have.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah, they were great. They were great. Well, good. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about? We can. We’ve got time, you know.
Mrs. Ergen: No, unless you have some other questions about something.
Mr. McDaniel: No, not really. I just wanted to talk to you about your life in Oak Ridge and your family, and how you’ve liked it.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, we loved it here in the wintertime, and probably we were one of the groups of skiers, and you know that there was no place in the Smokies for skiing at the time, so the skiers got together and we went up to Indian Gap, and Indian Gap has got a sweeping area down without trees, so it’s a good ski area. There was a lot of snow there in winter, and we could always drive up there. That was about as far as you could drive up on the trail in the wintertime because of the ice and snow up there. But we’d get a jug of hot chocolate and some sandwiches together, and we’d go up there with our kids, and sometimes a friend or two would go along with us. They still remember those trips up there, and that’s where my children learned to ski.
Mr. McDaniel: Where is Indian Gap? Where is that?
Mrs. Ergen: It’s on the way between the top and the place you turn off, Newfound Gap. Between Newfound gap and up the top. That last road up to the top.
Mr. McDaniel: Up in the Smokies, yeah.
Mrs. Ergen: On the Smokies.
Mr. McDaniel: Clingmans Dome.
Mrs. Ergen: And so the fellows got together and they made sort of a rope tow, so that when you got down to the bottom of this hill, at least you can pull yourself back up –
Mr. McDaniel: Pull yourself back up. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: – on the rope tow. We didn’t have any gondolas, or anything like that, you know, but we did the best we could, and so we –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s probably something you missed. You probably did that growing up, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: A lot of winter activities.
Mrs. Ergen: I missed ice-skating because ice-skating was my special sport. I really liked that.
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mrs. Ergen: When I was in high school, I was on the speed skating team, and we had a park, or a lake, actually, in Minneapolis that was called Potter Horn, and it was an oval lake with an oval island in the middle of it, so the lake was sort of a racetrack. And so we had all of our winter sports, I mean all of our ice skating sports at that particular park because it was just perfect for that, and so I miss that.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure. But I guess you kind of had to give up ice-skating when you came to Oak Ridge. You kind of had to give up ice skating when you came to Oak Ridge, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I did, but there was a place over in Knoxville, the Ice Chalet, that came up later and had ice skating, so I would go over there on Wednesdays and ice skate. But I haven’t done it any of that and I haven’t skied since I was out in Telluride back when, I don’t know, I was about seventy-two, I think, when I skied the last time, but because I was so old, they gave me a free lift, a free chair lift.
Mr. McDaniel: So “Yeah, I haven’t skied since I was seventy-two.” That’s kind of like – I was having dinner here a few years ago with these fellows, and I’m not real active but I’m somewhat active, and these were some older gentlemen, and they were all sitting around and one of them said, “Yeah, when I turned sixty, I jumped out of an airplane,” and this other guy said, “Well, when I turned seventy, I walked, like, a thousand miles on the Appalachian Trail,” and things such as that, and I was like, “Well, I just turned fifty, and I drove to Knoxville to Krispy Kreme.” [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: [laughter] That would be what I would do, because I love Krispy Kreme.
Mr. McDaniel: I got in the car and drove to Krispy Kreme for my 50th birthday. Well, good. Well, you seem active now.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, I’m still volunteering up at the museum. I have since I retired. It’s a good place to work and I enjoy being up there. Well, I used to see Selma every week, and when we’d get together, we were just really good friends. We were a team, and I really do miss her a great deal.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now, I hadn’t seen her in a while, but of course I followed near the end, when she was about to pass away. Just one more question about the Children’s Museum, I mean how have you seen it change, other than growing through the years? I mean have you seen a different type of person that comes to it, or a different kind of appreciation, or is it kids or kids?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, the adults enjoy it as much as the children do. As I say, they just got more things, and they’ve gotten more organized about extracurricular activities. I mean they have more things to offer the children, the summer camps and different things that they don’t probably experience in the high school, and they have the longer periods for them to stay rather than just a class for an hour. Selma’s vision, when we first started the museum, she said to me, “You know, Viola,” she said, “Someday,” she said, “We’re going to have this whole building as a museum.” She said, “All fifty-five thousand square feet,” you know, and I looked around – well, I think I told you that already.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Ergen: And this has come to pass, I mean, it’s old, and plus with outside, too. Now, the garden is beautiful up there, that they worked up there, and all the plants are doing well. The children planted the vegetables in the garden, and they’ve already dug up potatoes and the radishes. They’re all out of season already.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s a nice legacy, though, isn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: It is.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you know, for you and her both, to know that you worked so many years on growing it and the purpose of the Children’s Museum. That’s a nice legacy.
Mrs. Ergen: I think so, and the different things that they have there, I mean there are things that everybody enjoys doing. The train area, which was one thing that surprises me, is how much the children enjoy the train area. I had no idea that they’re so eager to get to the train and practice on the little toy train that they have there for them to work on, and watch the trains go around and around. But I guess, since we don’t have trains to ride on anymore, really, and if you want to ride the Amtrak, you’ve got to go miles away to find a place to get on, and so you just don’t have trains to ride anymore like you used to.
Mr. McDaniel: Not like you used to. I guess when I was a Cub Scout or something, I remember taking a train trip up in the mountains, but that’s the only time I ever rode a train.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, it was?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. That was the only time I ever rode a train, was when I was a kid. But I was hearing on the radio just the other day about this place in Knoxville now that’s got a train, and every weekend they’re doing train trips around Knoxville, and it’s for –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, around Knoxville?
Mr. McDaniel: – I can’t remember what it was. I need to listen closer. I’ve been hearing the advertisement for it, but it’s kind of like the Secret City train, you go and you go for an hour and a half on a little trip and then it comes back around.
Mrs. Ergen: The kids would get an idea of what it’s like to be on a train.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. My boys are ten and thirteen, so I need to take them on that.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, you really do. You do.
Mr. McDaniel: I really do. Get them out of their iPods and headphones and games, and everything.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah. Well, children have changed. I mean they don’t play as much outdoors as they used to, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s true.
Mrs. Ergen: I always played outside all the time. All the neighborhood kids did, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. When I was growing up in Kingston, we had a street probably like this, and there were probably thirty houses on it, something like that, but at one point when I was growing up, there were a hundred kids on that street. I mean everybody had three or four kids, and we’d come home from school and we’d go outside until it was dark, you know? Kids don’t do that anymore.
Mrs. Ergen: When we first came here, they did that. We had a lot of children in here, but the original people are all pretty much gone.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Well, you’re still here.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, and Miss Williams is still here, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Across the street.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, good. When did she move in?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, she was here when I came.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, so she was already here. I think she probably came in ’42 or ’43, or somewhere early on.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, I’m surprised at how many people that came in the ’40s are still in the same house that they moved into. There’s a lot of people in Oak Ridge that –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes.
Mr. McDaniel: – a lot.
Mrs. Ergen: The same house. My neighbor next door up here, Mrs. Frasier, who is now in a nursing home, but Howie, her son, plans to move into the house himself, and that’s another thing. There’s a couple houses up there that people’s children are moving in now. The parents have gone and so their children are living in the houses now.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking time to talk with us.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it’s fine.
Mr. McDaniel: This will be good.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF VIOLA ERGEN
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
July 18, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is June 18th, 2011, and I’m speaking with Mrs. Viola Ergen here at her home in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Ergen, let’s start at the very beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised, and something about your family.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh. Well, I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10th, 1915, so I’ve been around for a while, and I graduated from the University of Minnesota in class of four hundred men and one woman.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: I was an accounting major, and was probably one of the first women accountants in the state of Minnesota.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mrs. Ergen: So I had a job with the university after I graduated, and in 1944, I was married to Dr. William Ergen, who was a nuclear scientist.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you graduate college?
Mrs. Ergen: 1938. June ’38.
Mr. McDaniel: And you worked at the college there.
Mrs. Ergen: I worked at the University of Minnesota as a Senior Accountant for many years.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Where did you meet your husband?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I met him at the Minneapolis Hiking Club.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mrs. Ergen: I used to go hiking every Sunday with the Minneapolis Hiking Club around the state of Minnesota for my exercise and energy after weeks sitting at a desk, and I knew a lot of the people in the club to begin with, and so it was something sponsored by the Park Board of Minneapolis. And a lot of people, young and old, belonged to it for years, and they enjoyed their hikes on Sunday, and we had an evening one on Wednesdays in the city, but the ones on Sunday were out of the city. Anyway, we were married in 1944, and he was working for Minneapolis Honeywell at the time on the automatic pilot.
Mr. McDaniel: He was working for Minneapolis what?
Mrs. Ergen: Honeywell.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, Minneapolis Honeywell, okay.
Mrs. Ergen: Minneapolis Honeywell on the automatic pilot, and then they got a contract for guided missiles, but Minneapolis Honeywell decided not to do this contract because it was not really their kind of job. They’re into small instruments, like thermostats and things like that. So the contract was given to RCA, so we moved to Princeton, New Jersey for a year, and there I worked for the Gallup Poll as a statistician most of the time, but once in a while, I’d have to pitch in to take a couple of ballots out and test them out in one of the little towns around to see if they were correctly written, or were giving you some partisan advice. And after a year in Princeton, we were moved to Camden, New Jersey, where the project of guided missiles which my husband was working on was doing some more work. We were there for a year, and then he read in The New York Times about a position opening up in Oak Ridge, applied, and so we came to Oak Ridge to work.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. Ergen: That was 1947, June ’47.
Mr. McDaniel: So it was after the war. You came after the war was over.
Mrs. Ergen: After world war was over, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, your husband, now did he go to the University of Minneapolis?
Mrs. Ergen: No, he graduated from the University of Vienna. He was an Austrian.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Was he an engineer, a physicist?
Mrs. Ergen: No, a physicist. Yeah, a physicist, a nuclear physicist. He had been working on nuclear, oh, on the atom and that sort of thing, as a researcher for six years in Sweden after he graduated from college.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, and he ended up in the states for the job at Honeywell?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, he came during the war, and when they finished the automatic pilot, which I think they still use on airplanes, then they had to find another project.
Mr. McDaniel: So that’s what he was working on? He was working on the automatic pilot for the airplanes?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, and then when he came here, in Oak Ridge, he worked on the automatic airplane.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah. They were planning on a – I mean a nuclear airplane.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, the nuclear airplane.
Mrs. Ergen: The NEPA [Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft] program. And he worked on that for four years before they decided to disband the project.
Mr. McDaniel: They decided that nuclear reactor –
Mrs. Ergen: Not safe.
Mr. McDaniel: – that nuclear reactor on that airplane was 1) a little too heavy to get off the ground –
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: – and 2) if it went down, it might be a problem, right?
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. Those were the two things that were wrong with it. So he took a job at Y-12 then, and worked on nuclear reactors and the nuclear submarine, and he was one of the teachers at the Reactor School, so we had a lot of foreign visitors here at the time. We enjoyed having them here because my husband spoke a number of languages, and his mother came to live here in Oak Ridge, too, when it was opened up to other people, and she was a real linguist and spoke a lot of foreign languages, and so they enjoyed talking with her because she could switch off from French to German or Italian just like that, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did they talk to each other and you wondered what they said sometimes?
Mrs. Ergen: No, they always spoke English.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, they spoke excellent English. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good. I’d be a little paranoid if somebody started to speak in another language in front of me. I would wonder if they were going to talk about me. So your husband, he worked here in Oak Ridge –
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: – until he retired, I guess.
Mrs. Ergen: Until he died.
Mr. McDaniel: Until he died?
Mrs. Ergen: He died in February of 1971 of a heart attack.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, let’s talk about you a little bit. So you moved to Oak Ridge in ’47.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And at that point did you all have children, or did you go to work?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, no. We had our first child here, and she was born in November of ‘47, and that’s my oldest daughter. I had five children and they all went to Oak Ridge High School, through high school here, and all went to the University of Tennessee, and they’re all big Vol [Tennessee Volunteers] fans. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Are they? [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: So when the football season starts, I see lots of them.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Now, do any of them live close to here in Tennessee?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I have one that lives in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was thinking.
Mrs. Ergen: He’s in the emergency room at, well, Mercy Hospital now. But he’s been there now for twenty years or more.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s right. But they all come in to see Vols in the fall, huhn?
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, yes. They all come in at the fall.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, they come in during the rest of the year, too, but they’re here every weekend during a football game.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came here in ’47. Now, did you work? Did you get a job?
Mrs. Ergen: No, I never worked because I was expecting the first child in November, and so I did not work, but I can tell you that I was very disappointed when I got here. It was a very hot day, and we got this “D” house. At that time, a lot of the executive officers, military officers, had left these “D” houses. We really weren’t supposed to have a “D” house, but they had so many of them on hand that they decided to let the newcomers pick out a “D” house if they wanted it. And the rent was only something like fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents, or something like that, so we decided on the big house. We’d been living in one room for three years in different places, and a big house looked really good.
Mr. McDaniel: And a “D” house is a pretty good size house.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, it really did, but the only thing was that we opened the door and the place was jammed with cockroaches –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it really?
Mrs. Ergen: – and I just about died with those cockroaches running up and down the walls, and all over the floors and that, but my mother was with me, and she’s rather a calm person, and she said, “Let’s just call the management people.” And so they came out and put bombs in the house and sent us to the guesthouse for the night, and when we came back the next day, we shoveled up – [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Shoveled up the dead cockroaches, didn’t you? Now, where was the “D” house?
Mrs. Ergen: The “D” house was on Forest Lane, East Forest Lane.
Mr. McDaniel: East Forest Lane.
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm. And so we lived there from ’47 to ’54, seven years, and then we had the leasing of land in Oak Ridge for people to build houses, and so we applied for a lot over in East Village. But Dr. Sharpie bid more money than we did on that lot –
Mr. McDaniel: Uh-oh.
Mrs. Ergen: – so he got it and we didn’t. So we were without a lot, and shortly after that they had these lots in this area available, plus some other individual lots. But my husband liked this lot because it had the 40-foot slope, for some reason or another, and so he bid the minimum bid on this lot and nobody else wanted it, so we got it. So this is where I’ve been ever since.
Mr. McDaniel: Maybe it reminded him of home in the mountains, or something, you know?
Mrs. Ergen: I think it probably did. We could see the mountains then. We didn’t have these trees out here. We could look out over there and see the Smokies from here.
Mr. McDaniel: And so you bought this lot, and then you had this house built?
Mrs. Ergen: And we built the house.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. And so this was –
Mrs. Ergen: In ’54.
Mr. McDaniel: And at that point, how many children did you have?
Mrs. Ergen: I had five by then.
Mr. McDaniel: You had five by then? Okay.
Mrs. Ergen: So we needed all the space in here.
Mr. McDaniel: You sure did, didn’t you? Well, good. Well, what were some of the – I know you were busy being a mother and raising those kids, but I’m sure you were involved in the community some, as well.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes, everything.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that. Tell me what you got involved in –
Mrs. Ergen: Well, the first thing –
Mr. McDaniel: – in the early days.
Mrs. Ergen: – the very first thing I did was I was asked to join the League of Women Voters, and so I became a member and I enjoyed that for twenty-five years, and then I had my daughter who wanted to be a Girl Scout and there weren’t any people – well, there were some people, but nobody really wanted to be a leader, so I decided that I guess I could be a Girl Scout leader, and so that’s what I did for eighteen years. I have two girls, eleven years apart, so I went through the Girl Scout program with my oldest daughter, and then I went back to the Brownies with my second daughter, and went back through –
Mr. McDaniel: Had to start over again, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: – start all over again.
Mr. McDaniel: But I bet your younger daughter got a better Girl Scout program because of that, didn’t she? You’d already practiced on the oldest one –
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: – hadn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: You know what to do afterwards, and I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from those girls. I mean, I’d never been a Girl Scout myself, so I learned a lot, and I liked camping, and we liked hiking, and we did a lot of fun things. They really liked to camp, those girls did, and I had a troop of forty girls, so those were the days when we had big troops and we had a patrol system, so it wasn’t too bad taking care of that many girls. It’s just getting all the cars ready to drive camping someplace.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you go camping, usually?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, we went all around the state here. Up at north, they had a camping area, and Anderson County Park, and the Smokies, of course. Every year, we went to the Smokies at least once, and Standing Stone Park, and some of these others, way a little bit farther off up around Monterey.
Mr. McDaniel: My mother, she did that, too, because I have two sisters, and she was a Girl Scout leader, and I can remember –
Mrs. Ergen: And I worked with the Arboretum Society. My friend, Lois Good, said I need to join that group. I had nothing to do, and then, of course, when my husband died, I got the job at the Children’s Museum with Selma and I started –
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me about that. Tell me what you did there.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I had worked to help Joyce Maienschein beginning in ’73 to set up the museum because my girls had had the teacher’s museum that they had before that in Cedar Hill School, and then when they all graduated in ’65, we put everything we had, which is about three rooms full of artifacts, into storage. And so we took that out of storage when her girls took the museum over and reactivated it, and set it up in the old library in Jefferson Junior High School. In fact, the school had already been torn down, but the library was still there, and they tore it down at the end of that year.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Do you need to stop and get a drink or something?
Mrs. Ergen: No.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re sure you’re okay?
Mrs. Ergen: I need a cough drop. I’ve got something to drink here I guess I could –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, here –
Mrs. Ergen: – I’ll take a drink of water.
Mr. McDaniel: – if you need a cough drop, can I get it for you or do you want to go get it?
Mrs. Ergen: No, I can get it.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Ergen: – busy at the church. We joined the Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in ’48 when we came here. We kept our membership in Minneapolis, and then in ’48 we transferred it over here.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So we were talking about the Children’s Museum. Go ahead and tell me about that, because I remember, oh, what’s her name?
Mrs. Ergen: Selma Shapiro?
Mr. McDaniel: Selma. When I talked with Selma, she was talking about how the Girl Scouts had really started that.
Mrs. Ergen: Started it back, and they were going to tear down the library, so the City offered us space at the Highland View School, and that was a lower level. There were about five rooms that they had available, and so they offered us those rooms. In the meantime, they also had part of the school was rented to John Rice Irwin with the schools because he was teaching the driver’s education courses at the time –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: – and then they had these big machines over in Joyner, the Caterpillars for road building and construction there. He was teaching those people over there, too, in his office up there, so he had a big office up there along the hall, and we borrowed his Xerox machine all the time. And then we had a daycare up there, and they had a class for adults who were mentally handicapped there that spent the whole day up there, so they had other places rented out, and they had people in the gym, the fencers and karate people, and some of the people from the Lab played basketball in the evenings. But we had that downstairs area, and it was Selma and I, and we had a budget of three thousand dollars the first year, and we had no fees. We didn’t charge anybody to come in the museum. If they wanted to come in, they could come, and we were busy cleaning, it seemed to me, and dusting and setting things up for about a year, painting things, because there was just the two of us to do all the work, and so that’s what we did. Selma really had a vision for that museum. I mean, she said to me really early, she said, “You know, Viola?” she said, “One day,” she says, “We’re going to have this whole fifty-five thousand feet in this building with museum artifacts,” and I says, “Well, okay,” and I looked around at what we had so far. We didn’t have much.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: But we did have two cabins in there, and we had a lot of odds and ends. But we were very lucky. During the years, people gave us collections of great things. One of the first ones we got was a bunch of plows, including a very early plow, and then we had people with jugs, gave us a whole two hundred and fifty jugs of different kinds, and so it just gradually grew as we got to be known as taking anything anybody would give us. And so, actually, I’d say that we didn’t buy anything for that museum until we went to an auction up in London one time, and we had sixty dollars to spend. And we knew this woman, she had talked with us when we had our big, national grant, and she had a small museum and she was selling all her wonderful things. But everything she sold was bid more than sixty dollars, so we couldn’t afford to buy them. At the very end, either people felt sorry for us, or I don’t know what, but nobody else bid on this buttermilk painted chair, and so we said, “Well, we’ll take it for sixty dollars,” and then we did. So that thing is still there in the museum. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So a lot of the stuff you got was Appalachian-oriented, you know, a lot of those kind of things.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, a lot of those things were that and people’s collections, and they were so glad to have somebody who would take their things and take care of them and display them. And so most of the things we have there, the dolls, all the children’s toys and all the other things in that museum have been given to us. We really have not bought anything.
Mr. McDaniel: And I imagine you probably started getting, in addition to the Appalachian stuff, you probably started getting international things because of the people that lived in the area.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Many of them came from outside the country, you know, things such as that.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, we had this one woman who went to Africa to teach, and when she came back, that’s where most of our African things came from. She brought back these masks and just all kinds of things, sculptures and things, anything she found to buy while she was there. She was there for two years, and she brought those back with her and gave them to us, and I remember we have one chair, it’s a fork and spoon chair, nicely carved, that somebody brought us. I think it was Dr. Gurney, and he bought it and his wife didn’t like it, so he gave it to the museum, and we were delighted to have it. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, there you go.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, so it added to our collection, and of course, during 1982 when we had the World’s Fair in Knoxville, we got a lot of things from the people there, from the Chinese and Japanese people. So they added to our collection of Chinese and Japanese people, and Peg Heddleson added a lot of Norwegian things she’d saved, and she’s given them to the museum, so we do have them permanently.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mrs. Ergen: So that’s where we’ve gotten a lot of the foreign things, and you’re right about people – people in Oak Ridge and just the surrounding, like Oliver Springs in this area, have been very generous with what they’ve given the museum.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you worked, I mean you worked with her for –
Mrs. Ergen: Until 2002.
Mr. McDaniel: – until 2002. Right. Right, a long time.
Mrs. Ergen: So it was almost twenty-eight years or so, but I had known Selma before because we had both been active in the Girl Scouts, too. So I’d known her from that time, and our two oldest daughters are such good friends –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.
Mrs. Ergen: – so they still are and see each other periodically.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. You were going to talk a little bit about being appointed to the Historical Society.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, yes. This was back in 1971, and Mr. Bissell sort of appointed a board of directors and we started this museum, and our purpose was oral history. We had quite a few people who became members, and I have a scrapbook someplace and I haven’t found it – I was going to find it for you, but I didn’t find it so I’d have a list of the people that were members, but most of them have died. You know, like Mr. and Mrs. Kearsley were an older couple, and they were very anxious to do the oral history, and they did interview a lot of people, and I think all of the interviews are over at the library in that Oak Ridge section now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, in the Oak Ridge Room. I know they got a lot when they first started this project.
Mrs. Ergen: But after, I think about maybe eight years, it just got to be sort of lack of interest, I guess, and the Society was disbanded at that time. John Rule was president for most of the time. I remember that, and he’s been dead for some time, too, now. But it was an interesting experience.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So did you do any oral histories yourself? Did you do interviews with folks?
Mrs. Ergen: I interviewed a few people.
Mr. McDaniel: And what did you do? Did you tape record them, is that what you did, or did you just –
Mrs. Ergen: We just wrote it down.
Mr. McDaniel: You just wrote it down, okay. I see.
Mrs. Ergen: We didn’t really have tape recorders in those days. We just wrote it down. I remember one of the people I interviewed was a lady over in Oliver Springs, and she had gone to the Wheat School and she’d ridden by horse, and I was so intrigued with her getting on her horse every day and riding to school over there, and coming back on her horse. That sounded like a lot of fun.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. So what were some of the other activities you were involved in in town, other things? You did the Girl Scouts. You did the museum. You were involved in the historical group early on.
Mrs. Ergen: I was involved in the church, too. I taught Sunday school, and I taught children’s church for many years, and Ruth Winston and I had the Senior Lunch Bunch once a month for lunch, and that was a big job to call all these people. We called them all up every month to be sure they were coming, for these senior citizens.
Mr. McDaniel: My mother does that now for her church in Kingston. They have the, what do they call it, Young at Heart Group. They get together for a program or lunch once a month.
Mrs. Ergen: You look forward to it. But I like to travel. In fact, I never did much traveling until I was married. My husband liked to travel, so we always tried to travel someplace and do something interesting. But Katherine Ledgerwood, who was a social studies teacher at the high school –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, what was her name?
Mrs. Ergen: – Katherine Ledgerwood –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, Katherine Ledgerwood.
Mrs. Ergen: – and she had this commitment to travel, and every year, she’d plan with a group a trip someplace abroad, and very inexpensively. So her first trip was to Greece, and we lived on a ship for about two weeks, and went through the Greek Islands, went to Istanbul, and traveled in Turkey, but we stayed on the ship the whole time. And then we went to Cyprus, and the day we left, they were at war with the Turks.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Ergen: Then we went to Jerusalem, and they were surrounding us with guns most of the time.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mrs. Ergen: But we spent a week – no, not a week, but about four days in Jerusalem and then we went to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, which is no more, and came home from there, and it cost a thousand dollars –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? What year was that?
Mrs. Ergen: – for everything. 1974.
Mr. McDaniel: And so it was a thousand dollars apiece, or for you and your husband?
Mrs. Ergen: No, just apiece.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah, a thousand dollars, that’s still –
Mrs. Ergen: That was everything.
Mr. McDaniel: – that’s everything.
Mrs. Ergen: All your living expenses and your travel from here to there and back. You can’t do that today.
Mr. McDaniel: Can’t do that today. You can barely drive to Nashville for that. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: But she had trips like this every year, and then once, we went to Australia and New Zealand and China, of course, the free ungated countries and British, and all the other European countries. I was actually with her for fifteen years before she died. But I enjoyed those trips.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mrs. Ergen: And I went to a lot of ORICL [Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning] meetings when they started here. That was one of the best things I thought that we have in Oak Ridge for seniors is the ORICL program, because you can take whatever you want, and they’re all interesting and you know all the people, or you know half of the people, anyway.
Mr. McDaniel: When did they start the ORICL? About when did they do that? Do you remember?
Mrs. Ergen: I know it must be at least ten years ago. I’d say around 2000.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I was thinking late ’90s, something like that. But that’s good, and I guess most of them have been at Roane State, haven’t they?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes. But they have nice trips, too, and I think that it’s nice for us to visit the state and find some of these interesting places we have here in the state, too. And one of the things that I think is interesting is where they found all the ancient fossils up here where East Tennessee is, East Tennessee University, and that was only a few years ago that they discovered those.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that wasn’t too long ago.
Mrs. Ergen: It would be interesting to find something like that in your state.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. So you said your husband, he had a heart attack and died in ’71?
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you say ’71? So I guess, in ’71, I guess by then your kids were grown, most of them were grown.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, they were all grown. Mary was still twelve, my youngest daughter, and she was at home with me and Charlie was still here. He was still going to school, in high school, but the other three – my oldest daughter had already been married, and was living up at – no, she was in Kentucky at Louisville. They were living in Louisville in Kentucky at the time. And she had graduated from high school in ’65, so she had been out for some time.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Now, how was the school? I mean, you know, you’re from Minnesota, and your husband wasn’t from these parts, as we say, so what was it like for the two of you to come to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it was interesting. I mean everybody here was from someplace else, so you had to make friends, and everybody got together and we had a Cosmopolitan Club for the people here who came from other countries, and they had gatherings every month, so they had either talks or picnics, or they had something they did together, enjoyed each other, and I think we had about two hundred and forty different groups in Oak Ridge that you could join if you wanted to, so there was something for everybody. Whatever you liked and thought about doing, or enjoyed doing, if you wanted to knit or quilt or whatever it is, there was a place for you here in this town. And everybody was very friendly. I think they all were people coming from someplace where they didn’t know anybody here, so they were glad to make friends, and that’s what we did.
Mr. McDaniel: But I guess you were really from the city, I mean you grew up in the city, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, I grew up in a big city.
Mr. McDaniel: A big city, so even though it was cosmopolitan, it was still a little different for you.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes, it was a bunch of different – my friends came, they couldn’t enjoy the big lots. All this, we built, that we have right below us here that goes down to the creek, and the kids would have more fun, I mean, playing around in the neighborhoods. I mean you didn’t really worry about them at all. They’d go out for the day and go in the woods and swing on vines, and pretend they were, I don’t know what, fishermen or something down at the creek, and see if they could catch tadpoles or something. So they all had a good time here playing outside.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Now, I guess you felt like your kids got a pretty good education here in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I think that at the time, we did have an excellent school system here, and I think the courses were difficult enough for the children at the time. They had to really work at them. I know that Fred, that’s my middle son, took history from Mr. Puckett over here at the high school. He was a very difficult teacher, and he loved chemistry, and he really got such a good background that when he went to college, he zipped through all the chemistry because he’d had such a good background in chemistry here in school, so we have to thank Mr. Puckett for that. And I can’t think of anything that they could probably do better. The only thing was that when Mary came along, they were going to change the math to a decimal system, which they did, and then my friend, Miss Young up here, who was teaching sixth grade, got these children and they couldn’t pass first grade arithmetic, but boy, they sure did know decimal math, and they could score eighth grade or something on that. So she sat down with them for about six weeks to teach them arithmetic. Flashcards, and Mary came home and was flashing cards, eight times eight, and so on, you know so they could get that – but they hadn’t been taught because they were going to teach this new method of mathematics that didn’t exactly work out the way it should have, I guess, and so they went back to the old system of mathematics again.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember the new math.
Mrs. Ergen: Do you remember the new math?
Mr. McDaniel: I remember my mom and dad going, “What in the world is this about?” you know? They were like –
Mrs. Ergen: It was a little difficult.
Mr. McDaniel: “Sorry, son, you’re on your own,” when it came to this.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s about the way I felt, too, about that. So I think they did get a very good education here.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now, were they involved in sports?
Mrs. Ergen: Charlie is the only one who was involved with sports. Basketball. And he played basketball and just loved it, and did very well in that. He was very fast. He wasn’t quite six feet. He was just barely six feet, but he was fast, and even though he was smaller than some of the other players, he managed to play very hard and do very well.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did he go on to play basketball in college?
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, he did. He played basketball the first year at UT as a walk-on and he played pretty much most of the time, but when he went to get on the varsity team his sophomore year, he was told that he probably wouldn’t play very much because everybody else on the team was a scholarship winner except himself. And so they had to play the scholarship winners, and so he probably wouldn’t play so much, so he decided to work on his studies instead.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, it served him well, didn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, he graduated a little early.
Mr. McDaniel: He could say, “I’ll show them.” Well, good.
Mrs. Ergen: So that’s what he did. He just went ahead and worked on his classes, then he was able to graduate a little early, from college, that is.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, anything else you want to talk about, anything you want to tell me about? I mean, you know, looking back on your time in Oak Ridge, what would you say would be the best thing about it, and what do you think would have been the thing that you wished had been different?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I hadn’t thought about it, but I think I enjoy small town living, frankly. I mean I enjoyed living in Minneapolis, it’s a beautiful city and it’s got so many lakes in it and there’s lots to do there, but living in Oak Ridge has been nice. You make friends and they’ve been friends basically for the life you’ve lived here, or the life they’ve lived here, and everything is so easy. I mean I don’t have to go very far to go downtown to shop, and everything is just kind of handy and close at hand. For me right now, it’s great living in Oak Ridge, except for the weather. I’d rather have Minnesota weather, where it’s a little cooler.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly, but I guess that it is one of the things, is people that come to Oak Ridge tend to stay in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Ergen: I think they do.
Mr. McDaniel: So you get to know them, and you stay friends for a long time.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. It’s a friendly city, and although there’s nothing wrong with a big city, but it’s lots of houses and lots of traffic and lots of roads, and lots of time to get from one place to the other. You spend an hour driving from one end of town to the other to find somebody or to visit with someone.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That was just like we were getting ready to leave, I looked and said, “It’s twenty till 2:00.” I said, “Jasmine, we need to pack up. We’ve got to get to Miss Ergen’s house,” so I was here in ten minutes. So you know, it’s handy that way. What would be the thing that you wished had been different about Oak Ridge, if there’s anything you can think of?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, in the early days, the secrecy was a little difficult to get in and out of Oak Ridge, and you didn’t get your friends in here very easily, and you had to always plan ahead of time, but that was all changed after they opened the gates. I don’t know that I’d change much about Oak Ridge, except I wish we had a decent mall and shopping here.
Mr. McDaniel: Join the club. [laughter] That’s what we need to have the new club is, Let’s Get a Decent Mall Club.
Mrs. Ergen: A decent mall, that’s right. That’s one thing I think they need in this town.
Mr. McDaniel: And, you know, at one point it was okay, I mean it was pretty good at one point.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, it was.
Mr. McDaniel: Early on, I think, and even before the enclosed mall came, the Downtown Shopping Center was pretty good.
Mrs. Ergen: I liked the original shopping center. It had a lot of charm.
Mr. McDaniel: It did. I remember going there.
Mrs. Ergen: And the Federal Bakery.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to say. I was about to say I remember walking by and smelling the Federal Bakery.
Mrs. Ergen: That’s right. We don’t have a bakery anymore. It’s all brought in. Those are the things that I miss, are a bakery. Back home, we used to just love the bakery around the corner because they had the best rolls, the best bread, and it was always the good smell outside when you went by, you know, all that good baking.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly, and Oak Ridge has changed, I guess, a lot. I imagine you all took the kids and went to, what was it, the Sky View? Was it the Skyline, Sky View?
Mrs. Ergen: Sky View.
Mr. McDaniel: The drive-in?
Mrs. Ergen: A drive-in center. Yes. Yes, we’d go out here to the one they had just out where the entrance to Oak Ridge is. They had one out there, and they had one by where the hotel – which hotel?
Mr. McDaniel: About where Kroger is now, isn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it was about in there, yes. About that area. They had one, too. And we’d pack the kids all up in the car one night, if there was a movie that they wanted to see, and pop a big bowl of popcorn, and we’d go over there and sit in our car and watch the movies.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course, I grew up in Kingston, so I remember us going to the Midtown Drive-In out there between Kingston and Rockwood and Harriman, you know, the same thing with us.
Mrs. Ergen: Fred came the other night and took me out, he and his wife came and took me out to dinner, and he said that the kids had gone out in the boat for the day and they were going to the drive-in movie to see Harry Potter, and I says, “Drive-in movie? Are they still around?” He said, “Yes, there’s one over in Knoxville someplace.”
Mr. McDaniel: There’s one, and I don’t know about the one in Knoxville, there’s one in Maryville –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh.
Mr. McDaniel: – on the other side. If you go from Maryville to, like, the Smokies, right outside the other side of Maryville, and they’re showing first-run movies, like the Harry Potter things, you know?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, maybe that was where they went.
Mr. McDaniel: It could have been. I mean it’s a pretty nice, big drive-in movie theater.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I think they were great to have.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah, they were great. They were great. Well, good. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about? We can. We’ve got time, you know.
Mrs. Ergen: No, unless you have some other questions about something.
Mr. McDaniel: No, not really. I just wanted to talk to you about your life in Oak Ridge and your family, and how you’ve liked it.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, we loved it here in the wintertime, and probably we were one of the groups of skiers, and you know that there was no place in the Smokies for skiing at the time, so the skiers got together and we went up to Indian Gap, and Indian Gap has got a sweeping area down without trees, so it’s a good ski area. There was a lot of snow there in winter, and we could always drive up there. That was about as far as you could drive up on the trail in the wintertime because of the ice and snow up there. But we’d get a jug of hot chocolate and some sandwiches together, and we’d go up there with our kids, and sometimes a friend or two would go along with us. They still remember those trips up there, and that’s where my children learned to ski.
Mr. McDaniel: Where is Indian Gap? Where is that?
Mrs. Ergen: It’s on the way between the top and the place you turn off, Newfound Gap. Between Newfound gap and up the top. That last road up to the top.
Mr. McDaniel: Up in the Smokies, yeah.
Mrs. Ergen: On the Smokies.
Mr. McDaniel: Clingmans Dome.
Mrs. Ergen: And so the fellows got together and they made sort of a rope tow, so that when you got down to the bottom of this hill, at least you can pull yourself back up –
Mr. McDaniel: Pull yourself back up. [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: – on the rope tow. We didn’t have any gondolas, or anything like that, you know, but we did the best we could, and so we –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s probably something you missed. You probably did that growing up, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: A lot of winter activities.
Mrs. Ergen: I missed ice-skating because ice-skating was my special sport. I really liked that.
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mrs. Ergen: When I was in high school, I was on the speed skating team, and we had a park, or a lake, actually, in Minneapolis that was called Potter Horn, and it was an oval lake with an oval island in the middle of it, so the lake was sort of a racetrack. And so we had all of our winter sports, I mean all of our ice skating sports at that particular park because it was just perfect for that, and so I miss that.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure. But I guess you kind of had to give up ice-skating when you came to Oak Ridge. You kind of had to give up ice skating when you came to Oak Ridge, didn’t you?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, I did, but there was a place over in Knoxville, the Ice Chalet, that came up later and had ice skating, so I would go over there on Wednesdays and ice skate. But I haven’t done it any of that and I haven’t skied since I was out in Telluride back when, I don’t know, I was about seventy-two, I think, when I skied the last time, but because I was so old, they gave me a free lift, a free chair lift.
Mr. McDaniel: So “Yeah, I haven’t skied since I was seventy-two.” That’s kind of like – I was having dinner here a few years ago with these fellows, and I’m not real active but I’m somewhat active, and these were some older gentlemen, and they were all sitting around and one of them said, “Yeah, when I turned sixty, I jumped out of an airplane,” and this other guy said, “Well, when I turned seventy, I walked, like, a thousand miles on the Appalachian Trail,” and things such as that, and I was like, “Well, I just turned fifty, and I drove to Knoxville to Krispy Kreme.” [laughter]
Mrs. Ergen: [laughter] That would be what I would do, because I love Krispy Kreme.
Mr. McDaniel: I got in the car and drove to Krispy Kreme for my 50th birthday. Well, good. Well, you seem active now.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, I’m still volunteering up at the museum. I have since I retired. It’s a good place to work and I enjoy being up there. Well, I used to see Selma every week, and when we’d get together, we were just really good friends. We were a team, and I really do miss her a great deal.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now, I hadn’t seen her in a while, but of course I followed near the end, when she was about to pass away. Just one more question about the Children’s Museum, I mean how have you seen it change, other than growing through the years? I mean have you seen a different type of person that comes to it, or a different kind of appreciation, or is it kids or kids?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, the adults enjoy it as much as the children do. As I say, they just got more things, and they’ve gotten more organized about extracurricular activities. I mean they have more things to offer the children, the summer camps and different things that they don’t probably experience in the high school, and they have the longer periods for them to stay rather than just a class for an hour. Selma’s vision, when we first started the museum, she said to me, “You know, Viola,” she said, “Someday,” she said, “We’re going to have this whole building as a museum.” She said, “All fifty-five thousand square feet,” you know, and I looked around – well, I think I told you that already.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Ergen: And this has come to pass, I mean, it’s old, and plus with outside, too. Now, the garden is beautiful up there, that they worked up there, and all the plants are doing well. The children planted the vegetables in the garden, and they’ve already dug up potatoes and the radishes. They’re all out of season already.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s a nice legacy, though, isn’t it?
Mrs. Ergen: It is.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you know, for you and her both, to know that you worked so many years on growing it and the purpose of the Children’s Museum. That’s a nice legacy.
Mrs. Ergen: I think so, and the different things that they have there, I mean there are things that everybody enjoys doing. The train area, which was one thing that surprises me, is how much the children enjoy the train area. I had no idea that they’re so eager to get to the train and practice on the little toy train that they have there for them to work on, and watch the trains go around and around. But I guess, since we don’t have trains to ride on anymore, really, and if you want to ride the Amtrak, you’ve got to go miles away to find a place to get on, and so you just don’t have trains to ride anymore like you used to.
Mr. McDaniel: Not like you used to. I guess when I was a Cub Scout or something, I remember taking a train trip up in the mountains, but that’s the only time I ever rode a train.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, it was?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. That was the only time I ever rode a train, was when I was a kid. But I was hearing on the radio just the other day about this place in Knoxville now that’s got a train, and every weekend they’re doing train trips around Knoxville, and it’s for –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, around Knoxville?
Mr. McDaniel: – I can’t remember what it was. I need to listen closer. I’ve been hearing the advertisement for it, but it’s kind of like the Secret City train, you go and you go for an hour and a half on a little trip and then it comes back around.
Mrs. Ergen: The kids would get an idea of what it’s like to be on a train.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. My boys are ten and thirteen, so I need to take them on that.
Mrs. Ergen: Oh, you really do. You do.
Mr. McDaniel: I really do. Get them out of their iPods and headphones and games, and everything.
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah. Well, children have changed. I mean they don’t play as much outdoors as they used to, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s true.
Mrs. Ergen: I always played outside all the time. All the neighborhood kids did, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. When I was growing up in Kingston, we had a street probably like this, and there were probably thirty houses on it, something like that, but at one point when I was growing up, there were a hundred kids on that street. I mean everybody had three or four kids, and we’d come home from school and we’d go outside until it was dark, you know? Kids don’t do that anymore.
Mrs. Ergen: When we first came here, they did that. We had a lot of children in here, but the original people are all pretty much gone.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Well, you’re still here.
Mrs. Ergen: Yes, and Miss Williams is still here, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Across the street.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Well, good. When did she move in?
Mrs. Ergen: Well, she was here when I came.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Ergen: Yeah, so she was already here. I think she probably came in ’42 or ’43, or somewhere early on.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, I’m surprised at how many people that came in the ’40s are still in the same house that they moved into. There’s a lot of people in Oak Ridge that –
Mrs. Ergen: Oh yes.
Mr. McDaniel: – a lot.
Mrs. Ergen: The same house. My neighbor next door up here, Mrs. Frasier, who is now in a nursing home, but Howie, her son, plans to move into the house himself, and that’s another thing. There’s a couple houses up there that people’s children are moving in now. The parents have gone and so their children are living in the houses now.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking time to talk with us.
Mrs. Ergen: Well, it’s fine.
Mr. McDaniel: This will be good.
[end of recording]